Er… yes and no.
Quite a few of them can be transported to a location, but once in place it is not practical or advisable to move them. YMMV. Buyer beware.
Can you clarify how this woodwork would work? Cabinetry is always specific to the kitchen, so unless people were ripping out their cabinets when they left, I don’t see why anything other than a brand-new apartment would lack them. And why would you take cabinets that almost certainly would not be at all suitable for another place?
Well, if by “used to” you mean “sixty years ago”. They’ve now been common for decades in even places outside city centers.
Condos have a relationship to rent control in some locations, but in the main, they can often offer similar pricing to apartments - but you building equity at the same time instead of “just” renting. In the long run you gaining back a large share of your value compared to rent. In addition, it’s not uncommon for the total cost of living in a condominium to be less than a comparable apartment, although it depends on the exact market, credit rating, etc.
I was alive 60 years ago, and my great aunt was around 60 when I was born, so to me “used to” is just fine to describe that.
These are good questions, and yet…still works that way, and I undersold the amount of furnishing you have to do. And no, it’s not just new apartments. Tagging @EinsteinsHund in the hope he might comment.
The Oddity of German Kitchens for an American Abroad (goseewrite.com)
Not even the kitchen sink | The German Way & More (german-way.com)
Just to add to @Maserschmidt’s post: my wife is addicted to various “House Hunters” TV shows, including ones in set in Europe, and I’ve definitely seen episodes in which the US-born home shoppers were stunned to learn that pretty much nothing in the kitchen would stay in the house.
There’s a discussion here of “kitchen furniture” European housing - what's with all the doors and corridors?: Short version is, it’s often not the same sort of built in cabinetry Americans are accustomed to - instead, it’s free standing cabinets like these
Well, I don’t have much to add, your links tell it all. I don’t exactly know the reason for this cultural quirk, but I guess it’s because Germans are obsessed with their kitchens. They love to shop for kitchens and find it unthinkable to live and cook in a kitchen they didn’t choose themselves. That’s why you have to buy or bring your own kitchen when you move into a new apartment, or even move with your own kitchen. I once did it, I changed apartments and moved with my kitchen, which had been tailor made for my old apartment, so with the help of some very handy friends I had to remodel and rearrange cabinets and appliances to fit to the new place. The only alternative would’ve been to buy a new kitchen modeled for the place, but I didn’t have the money.
Thanks for responding to the tag, EH. In addition to your guess, I’m thinking that none of my older relatives would ever believe the fixtures they got from someone else would be as clean as their own.
Yes, this I can absolutely confirm.
So in addition to the kitchen, is the bathroom typically redone as well? I would think that kind of concern about the kitchen fixtures would be multiplied in the bathroom.
I am not so sure you are getting ripped off when paying your assessment (monthly fee) to a condo association. It’s not like everyone in the association is keen on spending more money than they have to. That said it can be a lot more than owning a stand-alone home. You need to look at what you are getting for it. Condos will have common area upkeep and electricity and garbage pickup and water (at least where I live). You are paying others for the upkeep so more expensive than if you did it yourself in your own home.
After that all sorts of fees can come in. Are there maintenance people on staff? A doorperson? Elevators? Amenities like workout rooms or pools? Cleaning staff? The list is long and it does indeed get expensive but, if you add it all up, it can be reasonable. My brother has a place where his monthly assessments are outrageous until you see absolutely everything is in there including cable and internet and, the biggie, property tax.
HOAs can certainly suck but are an absolute necessity in a condo.
On the upside all these numbers are given up-front. No surprises (usually). You can decide if it is worth it or not before even going to see the place.
I will say one advantage is a condo HOA generally keeps money in reserve for this or that. If you own your own home and you aren’t great about keeping some money set aside you could find unexpected repairs difficult or impossible to afford. The condo HOA will (hopefully…doesn’t always happen) have enough reserves to cover unforeseen repairs.
NOTE: When I was looking for a place assessments were ALL over the place. Generally the older the place the more they were and often it was hard to figure out why they were so high beyond extra maintenance costs. Some were truly obnoxious. I asked my realtor and she had no answer. In theory that stuff is an open book you can inspect before buying but yeah…it can be bad. I remember a place I loved which had an outrageous assessment. Absolutely no one could tell me why it was so high so skipped that one.
We have three units in our condo association. Right now, we’re having significant carpentry, masonary, and painting done on the entire building. There’s really no way to do that without a condo association to pool the money make a single contract with the contractor. Also, our water/sewer bill is for the entire building; when the previous owners converted us into a condo they didn’t spend the 1000’s of dollars needed to split the water/sewer systems into three. The cost of water/sewer is around $1000/year and it’s just not cost effective to split them up for about $5000. Instead, we just each pay an equal amount regardless of how much we use.
The biggest expense besides painting, repairs, and the roof is insurance on the building. For the most part, the condo association just collects enough to cover expenses, and put money aside for known future repairs.
When I bought my old condo in 2002 it had great amenities including a swimming pool. In the month between when I closed and when I moved into the condo they filled the pool with cement. In the 20 years I owned that place they never lowered the HOA payment to account for the decreased cost of no pool.
As a member of the HOA you get to attend meetings and vote on who runs the HOA. I am also pretty sure the financial sheets are open for inspection to any member. Presumably you could make a fuss and rally other owners to get your assessment reduced and/or demand an explanation of why things worked out the way they did.
I would also think the pool being filled in should have been disclosed before you closed on your place. That or your attorney, who is supposed to review HOA meeting notes, would tell you.
That said, assessments almost never go down. Inflation, if nothing else, will see to that.
There is an affirmative duty to disclose that sort of thing; of course it depends on when the decision was made and whether the seller could reasonably be expected to know about it at the time.
I’ve bought and sold two co-ops in NYC and each time my lawyer went over the co-op’s financial statements and board minutes with a fine-tooth comb. When I sold my last apartment*, the buyer got annoyed because a new assessment showed up a month before closing, and I had to sign a thing saying I didn’t know they were going to do that. (Contract was signed already anyway, so it’s not like they were gonna back out, but you know how lawyers are.)
*And yes, anyone in those parts would understand you perfectly if you said “I just bought/sold an apartment.” The followup question is always “co-op or condo?” 
I assume your mileage very much may vary, and condo associations range from grossly incompetent to fairly efficient. Luckily ours is the later. We’ve paid the same amount ($362 per month) since we purchased the place in 2007. We all have access to the books and can see where the money is going. They’ve taken care to keep a rainy day fund and we’ve never had a special assessment: all big ticket items (new roof, painting, resurfacing of the parking area, etc.) have come out of the regular budgeting. They’re pretty frugal with our money, but don’t put off the necessary maintenance.
The close contender when we were buying was a condo in a beautiful historic stone tower. But the HOA fees were astronomical, increasing, and they had special assessments all over the place. The building was clearly very expensive to maintain and they clearly weren’t budgeting competently for it. It was a major reason why we ran away screaming…
When you purchase a leasehold property, you enter into a legal contract with the landlord (land owner), and this will stipulate both what you’re liable to pay for maintenance, and what the landlord’s obligations are. They’ll be drawn up between solicitors, so it’s not like the landlord gets to totally dictate terms.
I once owned a leasehold flat (funfact - in a converted church, so my landlord was the Church of England) - we had a resident’s association that negotiated with the managing agents of the landlord to monitor service charges, and we also had a say on what sort of building insurance we should have (I remember a long discussion about terrorism insurance because we were a church) and when major non-urgent maintenance works should be done (hallway carpet). We didn’t have a say when the church roof needed fixing, and that cost us personally about £15,000. Ouch. But we did have a say on choosing contractors for the work.
As for ‘can the landlord bulldoze the site’, well, when you buy a leasehold flat, you buy a lease from the landlord - which is often 99 years or more. So no, they can’t just bulldoze the site. Periodically you may have to buy a lease extension if it’s running down below, say, 50 years, as this has an impact on the value of your home. My parents recently had to fork out about £40,000 to extend their lease back up to 99 years.
New York area (including Hudson County, NJ) and Toronto as well. We like living in/around New York so my wife bought the 1BR we lived in like 15 years ago. About 8 years ago when we started thinking about kids we upgraded to a 2BR across town. We ended up keeping the old place and renting it out. Other than a few months during COVID-19 last year, we’ve never had any trouble renting it. There is always a stream of young couples or singletons looking to move to Hoboken for a few years. We don’t even care if they want to leave mid lease. Usually we have it rented again before they leave.
In both cases there is building maintenance and a condo board (with fees). They are generally pretty relaxes. Really the only “rules” are ones that improve the standard of living anyway (like no smoking in common areas).
Our newer place is a nicer doorman building, so it’s obviously more expensive. But it also has some amenities like concierge service, a full gym, playroom, and resident’s lounge. Newer buildings have pools as well. Our unit also came with a parking spot in the garage across the street. I don’t drive a lot, but it’s nice to be able to hop in our car on weekends and get out of the city.
When you purchase a leasehold property, you enter into a legal contract with the landlord (land owner), and this will stipulate both what you’re liable to pay for maintenance, and what the landlord’s obligations are. They’ll be drawn up between solicitors, so it’s not like the landlord gets to totally dictate terms.
A lease is a pretty formidable document. One point we haven’t mentioned is that, in the UK, after a long history of [some] freeholders of apartment blocks engaging in assorted mismanagements (letting maintenance contracts to friends and relations at excessive rates, etc), the law changed to allow a specified percentage (something like two-thirds?) of leaseholders to form a company and force the sale of the freehold rights to their company. I live in such a block, and therefore bought not only the lease of the flat but also a share in the freehold company; the lease document is the one made between the original developer of the estate and the first purchaser of my flat.
Over the last few years there have been growing numbers of complaints about developers of estates of houses selling them as leasehold and bumping up ground rents (which are normally a nominal amount) and service charges for common services to excessive levels after a few years, so there’s talk of reforming the law so as to extend the right of those leaseholders to force a sale or at least to take over management of those aspects.
Another point is that the law on rented properties in the UK doesn’t exactly encourage private landlords to offer secure long-term lets, shall we say, which is another incentive to buy. And of course, there’s the greater freedom to do what you like with a property when you have the freehold - hence the popularity of selling off public housing to residents (at least among the residents concerned), which is another factor driving people towards buying if they can, rather than having to find their way through an over-heated private renting market.
I get the impression, though, that on the whole, when residents here take over the freehold of a development, they don’t tend to be as restrictive as some of the horrors we hear about American HOAs, though I’m not quite sure why that might be so (this may be unrepresentative, but I remember seeing some US TV drama where prospective residents of an apartment in New York were being interviewed by a committee of residents - I can’t imagine that happening here, certainly not when it comes to buying a leasehold flat). Where I live we have assorted rules that are mostly common sense, and occasional reminders about assorted minor nuisances (leaving bbq equipment out in the communal areas, putting refuse in the wrong bins, that sort of thing), and just recently they’ve been tightening up on getting prior approval for major works within apartments. It’s much more likely there’ll be whinging to the directors, rather than from them, about assorted management issues. Since the directors of the freehold company are essentially a self-renewing oligarchy unless there’s some unlikely major revolt, I suppose they could become petty dictators, but as so often with small organisations, it’s mnore difficult to find new directors at all - where I live they’re pretty insistent on directors having suitable business qualifications and experience.
My understanding is that the board approval happens specifically with co-ops, not with any other type of ownership. I also suspect that’s part of the reason that co-ops seem to have lower prices than condos. But for the most part, the really petty rules I’ve heard about involve HOAs in developments of single family houses , not apartments. You can’t really make a rule about keeping the garage door closed at all times or mowing the grass exactly when it reaches 2 inches in an apartment complex. Of course co-op and condo developments have rules, but some of the issues regarding exterior areas don’t apply to apartments and from what I hear, that’s where most of the crazy rules are.